Claire Holland became a London councillor in 2014, topping the poll in Lambeth’s Oval ward, and only ten years later was elected chair of London Councils, placing her at the head of the cross-party collective of all 33 of the capital’s local authorities. That rapid rise, taking in becoming leader of Labour-controlled Lambeth in 2021, has been characterised by passions for environmental causes and the wellbeing of children – linked interests which align with her more than 20 years experience as a legal aid lawyer acting on children’s behalf.
I went to meet her in the stately, Grade II listed Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton following the boroughs marking the 60th anniversary of their creation and London Councils publishing proposals for “establishing joint decision-making arrangements between the Mayor and the boroughs” – a change which, if enacted, would have a big effect on the current, less structured, relationship between London’s City Hall and its Town Halls towards something much more like the combined authority models that operate in Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and elsewhere.
It is also a time of acute financial difficulties for many of London’s 32 boroughs, with the soaring costs of temporary accommodation adding to long-growing pressures on social care for adults and for children.
Last December, speaking at an All-Party Parliamentary Group for London gathering in the House of Commons, Holland said she saw 2025 as “a year of opportunity for London” in which housing problems could be tackled and economic growth increased “as the number one priority”.
But she also warned about “the crisis in council finances” and the “real risk that councils across London will start to go bankrupt” without a solid solution. So far, seven boroughs have qualified for “exceptional funding support” from the government, including Lambeth in relation to its housing revenue account.
The first part of our conversation focussed firmly on Holland’s London Councils role. The second part concentrated on broad issues faced by many boroughs, especially in inner London, with some particular reference to Lambeth.
For the record, when I teasingly suggested she might seek to become the first female Mayor of London, she very firmly ruled it out.
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The content and the timing of the London Councils devolution proposals have puzzled some. Though produced with the government’s forthcoming Devolution Bill for England in mind, the White Paper preceding it stated that London’s current “bespoke arrangements” will be retained and that City Hall will “draw on existing ways of working with London Councils to facilitate collaboration”.
No hint there of a “combined board” composed of the Mayor and the London Councils executive committee “responsible for decision-making over devolved powers and funding” getting a hearing. For On London, Richard Brown, who was involved in setting up the Greater London Authority, has argued that the plans are more radical than they might first appear, with implications that haven’t been fully thought through. Stephen Bush of the Financial Times and Ant Breach of think tank Centre for Cities haven’t been persuaded either.
Meanwhile, Sir Sadiq Khan does not seem overjoyed. City Hall responded with a statement that began with a list of the Mayor’s own proudest achievements before adding that he has “a good relationship” with London’s local authorities and vow to “continue to work closely” with them. There was, though, no mention of the London Councils ideas themselves, let alone an embrace of them.
How would it work in practice? London Councils says it sees a Mayor “who is empowered to advocate for London on the national and international stage” continuing. At the same time, it is explicit about wanting to put its collaborations with City Hall “on a formal footing” – an ambition Holland set out in her APPG London speech, at which senior City Hall figures were present, as a logical progression from, for example, working closely with Deputy Mayor for Business Howard Dawber and others on the London Growth Plan, published in February with a Holland-Khan joint Foreword.
Despite the sceptical reactions, Holland is upbeat about the London Councils document, describing it as a contribution to “a whole national debate” that provides “an opportunity to modernise the London system, to look at what could work better, how we can get better outcomes, how we can get swifter decision-making”. In being determined to ensure London doesn’t get left behind, as it has been compared with Greater Manchester and the West Midlands with the “trailblazer” freedoms they obtained under the Conservatives, Holland says London Councils and the Mayor are of the same mind.
“We support a really strong Mayor of London,” she insists. “We’re not suggesting at all that any of his strategic powers are removed, say around planning and transport. That’s vital and it works really well. What we want to do is look at relevant funding and powers around, for example, employment and skills, future growth, retrofitting and so on, where we could really work well together and in a smarter way”.
She argues that, rather than rendering decision-making in such areas more cumbersome and compromised, the combined board would streamline and improve them. “Things can take time working with the GLA [Greater London Authority],” she said. “We can find ourselves having to negotiate on a case by case basis every time, whereas if you have a formal system, that focuses the mind. We will know where the decision is going to be made. And we are suggesting a combined board precisely so we don’t have to dismantle everything already there”.
Holland also frames the London Councils plans as a form of insurance against a future Mayor being a less obliging partner than she says the current one has been. Though not chair of London Councils at the time, she was involved in some of the joint working that took place during the pandemic. This saw the formation of what is now called the London Partnership Board, which she and Khan co-chair. “We learned that partnership working at every level is where the gold dust is,” she says.
There have, though, been some high profile recent examples of the Mayor leaving one particular borough very much out of the loop. Westminster, Labour-controlled since 2022 for the first time in its existence, received very little notice about Mayor Khan’s government-backed Oxford Street transformation initiative, announced last September, and still isn’t happy about it. Then, the other week, Westminster councillors were not invited to Ronnie Scott’s famous Soho jazz club where Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner, the Mayor and representatives of the hospitality sector unveiled potential new mayoral powers over local licensing decisions.
Here again, though, Holland expressed confidence that any future further overlap of local and regional government powers, with Mayors possibly acquiring the ability to “call in” borough licensing decisions they thought contrary to London’s strategic best interests, could produce better, co-operative outcomes. “We want to work closely with the Mayor over licensing,” Holland said. “I’m not afraid of that at all. I really think we can work that out together.”
By way of example, she spoke about the cluster of LGBT venues in Vauxhall which, until its boundaries were changed, was in her Lambeth electoral ward. This formed a major part of one of Khan’s three night time enterprise zones (the others were in Woolwich and Bromley) and was strongly championed by his now-departed Night Czar, Amy Lamé. The nearby Portuguese business cluster was included too with the aim of boosting custom, including through later opening hours, but also improving conditions for workers.
For Holland, then, the combined board idea is not a power-sharing challenge to the Mayor’s autonomy, but a practical mechanism for cementing and enhancing ongoing co-operation between the different layers of London government. Time will tell if the government agrees.
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There are other things London Councils hopes to get from the Labour government. Unsurprisingly, Holland craves a restoration of lost funding, citing huge real terms cuts since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to power in 2010: “We need to be resourced. That’s the bottom line.” The prospect of multi-year funding settlements enthuses her, as these would enhance authorities’ ability to plan, as does the commitment to matching funding distribution to local need. She cites a 2023 Institute for Fiscal Studies report suggesting that London local government funding is 17 per cent lower than its estimated relative need, the biggest gap in England.
Fiscal devolution is high up on her list too, as it has been for London government in general since Boris Johnson when Mayor founded the London Finance Commission. Under this heading Holland, like the LFC, includes being given the power to raise an overnight levy or “tourist tax” on visitors. In her mind, this would be collected locally “and help us to drive local growth” making boroughs “less dependent on government grant and Council Tax”.
In Lambeth’s case, the council, along with local businesses, invests in nurturing a visitor economy centred on Waterloo and the South Bank. A tourism tax on the millions of people involved could cover some of that and, says Holland, be used to “benefit our more deprived communities” too. The government told the BBC earlier this month that it currently has “no plans” to bring in such a tax in England, but London government will be hoping it is open to persuasion.
In terms of other powers, Holland would like boroughs to have greater freedom to enforce road speed limits, using a system devised by the London Councils transport and environment committee. More muscle for getting to grips with dockless bikes is another priority.
The same goes for licensing private landlords, an area Holland describes as “really complicated” and heavily dependent on receiving national government approvals. “We know that there are really good landlords out there,” she stresses, “but also we know that there are landlords who need to improve and there are rogue landlords.” Not forgetting tenants, of course: “Our private renters are desperately calling out to have houses that are fit for habitation”.
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Like every London borough, Lambeth is both distinctive and hugely varied. But it is also urban territory with strong themes and contested issues found in other boroughs, particularly inner London boroughs, on both sides of the river. Typically, these concern the pace and form of property development, especially where housing is concerned, the management of road space and local transport, and street environments more broadly.
Holland, taking her cross-party, London-wide London Councils hat off and putting her Lambeth Labour leader hat on, characterises herself as very much pro-economic growth, which means being fundamentally pro-development, because that means more homes and more jobs in a borough grappling with chronic housing shortages and poverty. “For me, it’s about seeing the distress on a daily basis of families who have to live in temporary accommodation,” she says, “and the thousands of young people who are not in employment or training. We need jobs, especially for the young”.
Lambeth spent £100 million on temporary accommodation last year. That helps explain why Holland is unimpressed by local agitation against development, conspicuous in Lambeth down the years, often protesting that it is opposing harmful gentrification. “Often, the people who shout against gentrification are gentrifiers themselves,” she observes. “And it’s not just people in temporary accommodation you need to help. Young people of this generation cannot afford to leave home. We’ve consigned them to forever being with their parents. We need to support them with being be able to afford to live in London.”
Holland enthuses about Lambeth’s work with London South Bank University on creating “skills pathways” with a focus on equipping people for retrofit work, installing heath pumps and solar panels and so on. She highlights Lambeth’s own growth initiatives, saying these complement and reinforce the London Growth Plan, including its foreground Inclusive Talent Strategy. And she emphasises Lambeth’s – and London’s – need for “more capital investment, both public and private”. The former, she underlines, helps attract the latter, making housing and other projects viable. “We know investors want to invest in London. They really like the stability and the economic philosophy of the current government.”
She strongly defends Lambeth’s newer Low Traffic Neighbourhoods which, like counterparts in other boroughs, have met with some resistance, including a recent legal challenge to one in West Dulwich. Holland prefers to call them “healthy neighbourhoods”, confident that substantial air quality and road safety improvements are taking place and that the streets are becoming “more habitable for people just to move around in”.
She is particularly proud of the “school streets” iterations of the policy, saying that a scheme in Stockwell has seen a big reduction from the “5,000 cars a day that would go down the main road” and a resulting common sight of “children going to their primary schools on their scooters and their bikes”.
A founding conviction of LTN advocates is that managing road space in this way encourages people to travel less by car and more by other means, leading to an overall “evaporation” of private motor vehicle use in the wider area. There are ongoing disputes about the extent to which that has been happening across London, and about the findings of studies of LTN effects. Holland, though, is firmly of the view that “people are making other choices”.
She binds this into a larger upbeat vision, linking amenable street environments to more prosperous businesses, the two things combining against the forces of high street degeneration in difficult economic times. “I took a picture the other day of a school street near me at pick-up time of all these people sitting on these beautiful benches made out trees and the kids were playing,” she says. “That’s how we make our high streets nicer and our areas better.”
Local government can often be about negotiating settlements, resolving conflicts between different interest groups and differing, strongly-held opinions, and bringing disparate groups together in a common cause. Holland’s closing plea is for more freedom and resources for councils to do that work:
“We are drivers of local growth. If we are empowered, we can do that. We can’t answer all the problems, but we can work with partners to address the challenges. We are the critical players who can bring people together in order to reach shared solutions, whether that’s with health or policing, our local Business Improvement Districts, our small businesses or parents. Whoever it is. And that’s where we can get the solutions. So if you empower us, we empower the community.”
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